Asking Ottawa for infrastructure dollars: the premiers’ heavy lift

As the provincial premiers gather in Ottawa Friday, one item on their inevitable list of requests to Ottawa could be a heavy lift: infrastructure spending. Amid federal-provincial tension with Ottawa struggling to balance the budget amid an oil crash and the Tories facing an electorate that rarely thinks about infrastructure unless a bridge collapses, it’s not an easy sell.

Tom Axworthy, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and now a senior fellow at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, says the problem is that little political credit goes to governments that do invest in infrastructure projects.

“To start a road, a bridge, it takes year to build and you are probably out of office when it opens. You don’t get to cut the ribbon if you’re the government sponsoring it,” Axworthy told iPolitics.

In order to get big infrastructure projects done, Axworthy says there has to be a level of cooperative federalism.

“Each level has a role and responsibility to deliver policies for citizens of the country. You need all three levels pulling in the same direction.” Axworthy said.

With the loudest message in advance of Friday’s premiers’ meeting being that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is snubbing his provincial counterparts, that prospect seems remote.

While Economic Action Plan signs dot the Canadian landscape, giving the impression that Ottawa is already busy rebuilding the country by itself, federal investment in infrastructure has steadily decreased.

Over the past 50 years it’s the provinces, territorial and municipalities have been increasingly shouldering the costs of maintaining infrastructure, a burden that now stands at at 95 per cent of total costs, according to the report Opportunity: Time for a National Infrastructure Plan for Canada, conducted for the Ottawa think tank Canada 2020.

“The federal government is in the best shape to be investing in infrastructure,” Sean Mullin, an economic consultant and co-author of the report, told iPolitics.

Mullin stressed this isn’t due to mismanagement of finances by the provinces, but because the federal government receives more than 50 cents for every tax dollar.

Despite the growing call for spending from municipalities and provinces, the needs for infrastructure are endless and unsustainable, says Geoff Norquay, former communications director for Harper and now a Principal with the Earnscliffe Strategy Group.

Norquay says it’s easy for the opposition and the premiers to criticize federal infrastructure spending, but they aren’t the ones cutting the checks and finding the money to do it within a fiscal framework.

“The Prime Minister didn’t decide to spend eight billion dollars or ten billion dollars on infrastructure and went with family tax cut instead, that is a question of values and choices and that is what you put in front of the voters,” Norquay added.

And, with the economy leading recent polls as the top concern of voters and security and social issues high up as well, infrastructure tends not to be top of mind.